Just when the U.S. Government was moving towards closing 800 data centers in a process to move into the cloud, Amazon has something on the offering which could be helpful in filling up a few gaps. In San Francisco, at the NASA IT Summit, AWS GovCloud was introduced by Andy Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services on Tuesday. The designing of the solution has been tailor made for the contractors and government agencies of the U.S. It would be an helpful source for moving and uploading sensitive data to the cloud.
Amazon Web Services’ global public sector’s vice president, Teresa Carlson stated that AWS is already being used by more than 100 government agencies who are reaping benefits out of it. This move of Amazon could be hard hitting for its competitors as these agencies are moving towards adoption of the cloud.
Amazon has collaborated few of their existing resources and solutions for the cloud which have earlier been part of Amazon’s Web Services division. These include Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. It is quite similar to the personal cloud accounts, may it be of an individual or enterprise nature. The options available for one to pay here are on scalable rates as well as flexible pay-as-you-go.
Even though Amazon has offered the government with an option to help them shift to the cloud, there are still many hurdles which it will have to jump over to get it sealed. Security is one of the biggest hurdles as the information of the customers of the government needs to be secured. AWS GovCloud boosts off addressing the compliance and regulatory requirements. It moves around requirements such as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). It prevents any data’s upload which would give access only to “U.S. persons.” As for now, only the U.S. has access to the AWS GovCloud.
The launching of AWS GovCloud has been already in and if an
agency wants to access it, theyneed to sign an agreement with thecompany which has been termed as AWS GovCloud Enterprise Agreement. In case of others such as service providers, software integrators and government contractors, the access would be via the demonstration of their admittance. The restriction put on to let access only to U.S. persons will even be a positive point as for security issue.
Talking about the new Region, the level of security is as high as any other Region of AWS. It even supports the certifications and security controls of the existing AWS. These include PCI DSS Level 1, ISO 27001, SAS-70, FIPS 140-2 compliant end points and FISMA. It even gives an environment which would help it enable the agencies in complying with the regulations of HIPAA.
The offering of AWS could be appreciative as additionally, it even provides that the workloads and data which may be of the most sensitive nature can not be kept in private data centers or behind the firewall for long. The technical innovations adopted by Amazon has been strange but appreciatively a move to expand its base.